


The Ravenclaw Who's Crap at Riddles

by touchstoneaf



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/F, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-27
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-10-24 18:22:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10747272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/touchstoneaf/pseuds/touchstoneaf
Summary: Original character story inspired by my own realization that as a Pottermore-sorted Ravenclaw myself who has more than a little Hufflepuff in me, I'd be hopeless getting into my own common-room, because for God's sake, I cannot do riddles to save my life, and what would that be like?!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please note: there are queer and transgendered characters and situations taking front-and-center in this, so if that's not your cup of tea, steer clear. But if you've always wanted to know about what it's like to be trans at Hogwarts...this is my take.

So…there I was; sitting on the cold floor at the entrance to the Ravenclaw common room—yet again; second time today, even—counting the hours and wishing that muggle electronics worked within the walls of Hogwarts. If they did, at least I’d have something to do, like fiddle around on Facebook or YouTube, while I waited for someone to come along who could actually solve a riddle. God knew I couldn’t. 

The latest brainteaser had been, “What can you swallow that can also swallow you?” I’d tried “an ocean”, “a flood of butterbeer”, and any number of other answers regarding voluminous portions of liquid nourishment. Clearly I was on an entirely wrong track, however, because the damned door hadn’t budged. 

It had been an hour and a half since my last class had let out. My predicament came of the fact that only OWL and NEWT students had a free period right now…and apparently everyone else in my year and fifth year were off pottering round the lake right now or something. Only I’d done studying the books I actually had on me—at this rate I’d be ready for my NEWT in Herbology today, and the exam for that subject wasn’t till next week. At this rate I’ll be far ahead of my year on the entirety of that class’ material—but it didn’t help me with the ones behind the door. I badly needed to study for my Transfiguration exam, which was happened to be scheduled for three days before Herbology…but of course my book and notes for that class were in the tower, in my trunk, next to my creamy ash-wood four-poster with the starry blue brocade draperies lined at the edges with lovely bronze-colored satin.

I also needed to use the toilet. Had had to for a bit now, actually; but if I left that’d likely be when someone came along, and I’d miss my chance getting in.

I’d often wondered since the day the Sorting Hat put me in Rowena’s house (which had been, till my first time stuttering over a riddle to gain entry, the single proudest moment in my life) if I even belonged in Ravenclaw. If I even have the mind for it. If I were in any other house…

Well, If I’d been sorted into Gryffindor, that would likely be simple enough. I believe I could easily recall any password, no matter how often they changed it. I’d have to put up with those noisy, rambunctious gits in that house, of course, and their awful, garish colours, but I might be willing to trade the noise and having to slope off to the library to brave Pince’s domain for some quiet space to study if it meant I could get into my own bed before the prefects and teachers docked me yet again for being out past hours. If I’d heard it once, I’d heard it a hundred times at least since I’d started; “Honestly, you’ve had trouble with the riddle again? You _cannot_ be serious, can you? Are you sure you’re not at the wrong tower?” or some variation on, “Honestly, child; what on earth are you doing out in the halls this late? Five points from Ravenclaw!” It was rather a wonder my fellows had not excommunicated me for losing my house points on such a regular basis with my ineptitude. 

I suppose it would be more or less the same if I’d been sorted into Slytherin. I’d get along alright, their practice of using a password being similar to that of the Gryffindors. Better colours as well, and from the times I’d been invited to hang about in their common room, a tad quieter than the former. Though, I wouldn’t fancy a kip beneath the surface of the lake; it’d be all I could do to get to sleep knowing there were thousands of tons of pressure and thousands of cubic feet of water above me, with only a good stiff spell between me and the windows breaking, and my drowning in my sleep.

Ugh. The very thought gave me the willies; couldn’t imagine how my younger sib slept a wink down there. In my humble opinion, should anyone actually want to find a true psychological cause for some of the mental aberrations to be found out of Slytherin’s graduates, one had only to look into the looming presence of that lake. Whose brilliant idea had that been anyhow, I wonder? 

Mad, all of them, really.

Not that they’d take me. I got the feeling that a lot of them thought me a bit dim (though I didn’t see any of them wrestling with riddles to gain entrance to _their_ common room). Besides; I’ve no grand ambitions for my future. Find a job using magic, preferably somewhere I’d always get to huddle in amongst a load of books, and I’d be well chuffed. No sense seeking “greatness” or any of that folderol when all you wanted was to find a place to be useful and to occasionally show off the yards of useless trivia I keep stored away in my brain at any given moment. That, honestly, left me right out of Slytherin whether I’d fancied their common room or not. That lot had this sort of drive to prove themselves that I sorely lacked. Like my brother. 

That one was going places. He had his entire life planned out already; a meteoric arc, complete with inscribed stars and rockets.

Hufflepuff, though; that might have been just the ticket. Not for the first time I thought that perhaps I should just chuck it in and become an actual member somehow, finally move in permanently. Just officially lay claim to a spare sofa or poof and refuse to budge. After all, I reportedly sported as many Hufflepuff characteristics as Ravenclaw ones (or so I had been told, ad nauseum, over the last six-odd years). Too sweet for my own good, since I hate being teased myself; friendly to everyone and hating to say a bad word…and I abhor unfairness. 

For one thing, it simply isn’t logical.

Not to mention that since it’s literally right next to the kitchens, there are always loads of folks hanging about their common room entrance to give me entre should I ever have trouble remembering their code. I expect I wouldn’t though. I think I almost have the knack of the pattern they knock into that barrel by now, no matter how they have me look in the other direction while they tap me in.

Their common room is nice as well. God knew I had spent enough time down there by now to appreciate the finer points, having so often had no other haven. It’s lovely and inviting down there with all of that mellow, gold-brown wainscoting and those beautiful wood beams and buttresses; full of gorgeous, frothy plants like ferns and things, and colonizing sorts like ivy and philodendron wandering round the ledge along the ceiling, the vines wrapping round each window frame in a vain attempt to climb right out and rejoin the rest in the gardens. Lovely, poofy, sun-coloured sofas and armchairs abound as well; ones so comfortable it was amazing any of them ever get any studying done without falling fast asleep at every moment. 

I know I have that problem, at least, whenever I’m invited to kip there (something I’ve done for times uncounted, by now). I’d no idea for the first few years what the bedrooms were like, but since I wouldn’t ever officially room in there anyhow the common room would, I think, do nicely. I’d get little sleep, between the late-to-bed, last-minute study groups and stragglers after quidditch matches, and the early-risers (though part of me still assumes there are few enough of those in Hufflepuff since the beds had proved, in the end, to be as soft as the couches)…but it would be worth putting up with short sleep to be able to get _in_ all the time.

And…hang on, let me tell you a secret. You’ve never truly slept until you’ve slept in the Hufflepuff four-posters. They’re like sunny, cozy, yellow clouds. 

Especially when warmed by that special someone.

But I’d been sorted into Ravenclaw, through some torturous Sorting Hat tomfoolery…and here I was instead, in the same place I’d been stuck for most of my Hogwarts career. Though I knew it was little use, had never worked before, I thus pondered at it again. “What can you swallow that can also swallow you?” 

Clearly it wasn’t something you could actually drink—though I rather thought I should’ve gotten in on a technicality by now since that’s actually something you _could_ do in a flood; you _could_ swallow water, and if there were enough, it _could_ swallow you in turn. Ought I not be inside already? 

Though I knew I’d be made welcome as always down in the Hufflepuff cellar (never once in six and a half years had they turned me away), I yearned for my own common room. It was the only reason, honestly, I hadn’t begged the Sorting Hat to reconsider after my first week when the plummeting of my already-iffy self-esteem bade fair to become a pattern with each day I couldn’t get into the place. Aside from the devotion to knowledge for knowledge’s sake that permeates my house, the place just eases my soul (when I can get in, that is), with its lovely blue and white and bronze colouration—like a part of the sky the tower pierced with each turret had been made captive inside the ceilings. It isn’t just the quiet of scholarly respect, either (every time there isn’t a quidditch match to discuss, of course). It’s…that unspoken understanding from everyone else in the room how important is reading for the fun of it; doing extra work to be sure you’re ready for an exam; the thrill that came of actually enjoying research, of practicing spells till perfect and the like. 

Moments like those, I actually feel I belong. Our tower has its own library, for goodness’ sake! We don’t even have to go down to bother with crotchety old Madame Pince, who has to be something like three hundred years old and thinks that all books are made of flaky old vellum still. And don’t get me wrong, I think books are sacred as well (okay, honestly, everything with writing on it at all. At home I have loads of magazines and newspapers stacked everywhere there aren’t books in case I might get a chance to read them, can’t bear to throw any of them away. It drives my mother mad; she is forever cleaning me out while I’m away at school). But, look; Pince takes it to extremes. 

The fact of the matter is, though, if I love my tower so much, if I feel I belonged at all, I ought to be able to get into it! Time to reapply myself. Ignoring the painful, niggling doubts of a person for whom this had never worked, I screwed up my brow in determination, dismissed again the distraction of my clamouring bladder, and bent myself to the impossible task at hand. /All right then, so it’s got to be something figurative, I thought for probably the hundredth time. Figurative. Metaphorical. What can you metaphorically swallow? Er…your words? Could your words swallow you?/ 

Not really, unless you got lost in a book or something (which I did regularly, but I doubted it would get me in).

Still, worth a shot. “Er, I’m ready to try again.”

“Go on then,” the beautiful, sing-song voice of the tower door hummed, all smug and chime-like.

Sometimes I hated its dulcet tones. “Er, how about, your words? Like, I swallowed my words, and I was swallowed by words? While reading?” I added hopefully.

“Sorry,” the bronze eagle-head knocker told me shortly, and went silent. The bloody thing had gotten an attitude with me over the last several years; so much so that it didn’t even bother to tell me why I was wrong anymore. 

It had used to be more patient with my shortcomings.

“Er…” But I gave it up as a bad job and fell silent again. I simply would _not_ beg. 

I used to try, but it had never gotten me anywhere. The door always remained stoically, self-righteously silent to every vain protestation that it could really just let me in this once. After all, I’d argued in the past, it _knew_ I was a Ravenclaw, and it wasn’t as if I would be going in to murder anyone even if I wasn’t. For one thing, the damned door let in guests all the time from other houses come visiting with their Ravenclaw friends—though granted, only when they came along _with_ Ravenclaws or with a teacher—and apparently it was part of the animatory spell that it could somehow discriminate, otherwise, someone’s friendly intentions. If it couldn’t, I suppose it would be no use at all, would it? Anyone who was clever enough could just walk right in and slaughter everyone in their sleep. 

Not that most non-Ravenclaws did well at the riddles in any case. Which was partly why I thought I might not belong, after all, though I did well enough as regarded the other aspects of being put in my house. 

I rather thought the bloody door thought I wasn’t good enough to be in the house either, considering its attitude, which must be why it didn’t bow to my impeccable logic when I argued with it. Anyhow, no sense throwing effort after something that didn’t work, as they said.

/C’mon then, you can do this!/ It was my usual “pep talk”, as my mum called it. It seldom worked, but anything was worth a trial. /What can you swallow that can also swallow you, metaphorically? Ah, what have I “swallowed”? Er…someone’s “guff”?/ Mum told us she wasn’t going to swallow any more of our “guff” all the time. /Could guff swallow me, whatever guff is?/ 

/Doubtful./ 

/What else, then? Er… One could swallow…/

/One’s words!/ 

/Argh, no!/ I reminded my brain fiercely, /I’ve _tried_ that. Now, what could I swallow that could also swallow me?/

/Water!/ my idiot brain insisted stubbornly for the millionth time. 

/No!/ I shouted back grimly. /Stop _saying_ that! It’s already said that’s not right! Er…I could swallow…/

/Butterflies? I’ve plenty right now, in my belly; they must’ve gotten there somehow./ Though, I doubted butterflies could swallow me. It was always my problem; the second half never worked. /What about…/

“What’s the riddle?” asked a distracted sort of voice, and I jerked up my head roughly, startled, to see a second year named…what was it? Jeana, I think?…speaking like most Ravenclaws, without noticing much of her surroundings, her nose firmly buried in the “Standard Book of Spells, Grade Two”. 

“What can you swallow which could also swallow you?” the door repeated in an excited tone, as if it had gotten thoroughly bored of me and was enthusiastic about someone else having a go who wasn’t as idiotically dull as I was. 

The second-year didn’t even pull herself entirely out of her book. “Pride,” she muttered, without even pausing.

“Well-reasoned,” the door-knocker burbled smugly, and the portal swung immediately open. 

I made a face. Fine, then; make it look easy. /PRIDE. Of all the…/ You swallowed your PRIDE…or it swallowed YOU right up. /OF COURSE!/

That was the problem with riddles though, that drove me particularly batty; they were utterly obvious once someone gave you the answer. Just not before. 

At least not to _me._

You see why my every day up here was an exercise in humiliation? How awfully lowering it was to be slower than someone five years younger who could do something effortlessly that you couldn’t if your life depended on it? Or your bladder and your marks, at least. 

“Thanks so much!” I gasped to the second-year, and dove through the open doorway before she had entirely realised I was there. She was still lifting her head from her “Standard Book of Spells” to regard my sudden appearance with startlement as I disappeared round the statue of Rowena Ravenclaw. Though usually I liked to admire the appurtenances I preferred over all others, right now I scarcely noticed the elegantly-domed roof, gorgeous arched windows, the fluttering bronze gauze and blue silken draperies, and stately white marble pillars as the common room went by in a blur. Before my fellow Ravenclaws scattered about the room could even register my presence, I’d passed the statue’s carven robes and skidded beyond the foot of the marble staircase that went off to the dormitories. There, to one side, was my goal, where the girls’ lavatory and baths lay right off the common room to the left (the other, for the lads, lay directly across, to the right of the white stone balusters). 

The heavy draperies marking the entrance to the WC and obscuring the fluted, pillars beyond went by in a flapping storm, and I was blissfully inside a stall with the blue door latched with the bronze hook; probably before little Jeana had even gotten all the way through the common room door.

Relieved, I paused to catch my breath as I washed my hands in the lovely marble sinks with their elegant, filigreed, eagle-headed bronze spigots and old-fashioned, long, marble-inlaid bronze toggles. I was somewhat more staid as I exited through the long, blue-velvet curtains to the bathroom, but as I recalled my other urgent matter I swung myself off the end of the simply carved balustrade and was taking the stairs three at a time to the second-to-top storey where my bed and trunk had been since first year. I dove past the sign that now read “seventh years”, scurried along to the third bed from the door, and shoved aside a pair of jeans impatiently to access my trunk. 

Once it was open I carefully laid aside my lovely big book on “Powerful Plants, Wizarding Weeds, and What to Make of Them, Advanced Level” with all its gorgeous illustrations. I reminded myself as I did that I’d have to remember to thank Billy Bollanger down in Hufflepuff for helping me understand the bit about belladonna’s relationship to mandrake since it hadn’t made the slightest bit of sense to me till two hours ago (another positive effect of my spending so much time in Hufflepuff was that I got a lot of help in Herbology, since it wasn’t my best ever subject).

“Oh, damn!” I exclaimed as I laid the book in its place. I’d gotten a bit of water from the sink on it when I’d washed my hands!

Well, best not tell anyone; it might end up getting back to Pince. If I was ever in bad odour with my fellow Ravenclaws before end of term I’d need her on my side during these ultimately important exams…and Pince was famous for blacklisting students who’d ever in any way damaged a perfectly good book. 

Patting the otherwise pristine tome in apology and smoothing the bubble in the page ineffectually where it had gotten the drop on it—hopefully I could press it back down with the weight of the other books in here—I buried it under the weighty “Potion-Making for the Advanced Student of the Arcane Arts” and pulled my eyes regretfully away. In its place I pulled “Deadly-Difficult Transfigurations for the Advanced Student”, and impatiently tossed aside the curtains on my bed soon as I’d got it. Throwing myself down on my familiar, comfortable four-poster in a flurry of heavy draperies, I dove in immediately to relieve my other burning need; the hunger of the mind. 

It had been driving me mad for over an hour; what on earth had professor Shifty been on about in that little “hint” he’d given us as we’d left the transfiguration classroom last period? He’d said there was a passage in the fourteenth chapter on how transfiguration related to apparition—I hadn’t even known it had!—what was it, again? And why in the world should they be related at all? One was for changing one’s shape, one was for travelling; unless of course one transfigured oneself, unconsciously, into, like, atomic energy and back again when one apparated? 

Of course, the being part-muggle bit had struck again; in the end the answer would as likely have nothing to do with science at all (though it was one of my pet projects to do a study someday comparing the two and finding intersections). Shifty had said it was something to do with transfiguration and apparition using the same rules, which rule also had some sort of relation to Gamp’s Laws… 

Where had I last read that bit about Gamp and apparition? I mean, everyone knew Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration; you learned that back in, like, second-year Transfiguration, but did you know that’s just one of only about five laws Gamp had come up with to do with transfiguration alone? There were theorems like “Gamp’s Lesser Known Law of Non-Elemental Transfiguration” as well…and loads of others. Gamp was no one-hit-wonder, and I admired her like no other. All told she had written I don’t even know how many magical theorems and proved something like seven other laws as well as her best known; one of particular interest to me and a few other students who shared my other main predicament. That one, aptly titled “Gamp’s Theorem on Potion-Led Transfigurations” was actually kind of the centre of a personal imperative to me since…

Well, let’s just put it one way. You know why most folks, when they use polyjuice potion, prefer to choose the hair or whatever of a person who has all the same, er, parts as they do? It’s because that change is not just skin-deep, if you follow. It goes all the way down to the cellular level; the actual DNA. You become a kind of chimera, actually, if one were to use the scientific terms—see what I mean about bringing a modern muggleborn perspective to all this?—and most people are not all that interested in, ah…growing other bits, or losing the ones they’ve become used to having; not to mention experiencing—however briefly—all the related, ah…hormonal differences and the like. 

Some few of us, though, are deeply interested in figuring out ways to make such transfigurations, be they spell-based like those of the animagus—only, you know, not with animals—or potion-based as with polyjuice, permanent specifically because…

Well, let’s just say that if we could corner the market on that particular magic, brand it, find the science behind it, it could help a tonne of people—muggles and magic folk alike—who don’t feel particularly happy in the bodies they’re in. That’s all.

Anyway, Gamp is basically my hero…but that is neither here nor there in this particular moment. One couldn’t focus on one’s pet projects and independent study proposals when one had exams to sit in in short order.

I know this apparition business would be on the NEWT or Professor Shifty wouldn’t have mentioned it—Shifty Turnien rather liked the Ravenclaws, I thought—so I had to understand it before tomorrow or I’d be laughed out of Ravenclaw for good for missing it on my last and final exam ever for transfiguration at Hogwarts. Even by my close friends, the ones who always took pity on me for my riddle handicap and liked me anyhow would probably look on me with special pity in that event. 

That just wouldn’t do. Especially not…

I caught myself wincing at the thought of seeing the Thomas-Finnegan twins and their younger sister twitting me for missing the question, whatever it might be. This deadly mental image threw me into a spasm of obsessive searching and contemplation. Those kids, orphans like so many others adopted after the war with Lord Voldemort, had been raised by war heroes from Gryffindor, and yet they were in all three in Ravenclaw. I’d never live it down if the twins were to beat me on the Transfiguration NEWT! After all, we’d been friends since first year (not to mention, they never once missed a riddle to get in)! If they could do it, so ought I!

If only the relationship between transfiguration, apparition, and whichever Gamp’s law it was wasn’t so much like a bloody riddle!  
***


	2. Chapter 2

My first days at Hogwarts had started out like my last were ending, currently; in an equal flurry of elation and humiliation. Like every other first year, I’d come to Hogwarts the first time across the lake in a tiny boat in the middle of an early autumn storm. Like many of my fellows, I came as a half-blood…but I was a bit different than most half-bloods at this most prestigious of magical schools on the Isles. My mum was American witch, and as such had instead attended Ilvermorny, where they learn all sorts of neat Native American magic and things as well as more standard European stuff like at Hogwarts; and after that she’d gone on to the North American Academy of Magics in Salem, which was really just a top-notch graduate institute. (Most people don’t know it, but just about every continent has at least one magic school for secondary and quite a few have places to go on beyond secondary as well…and they all have specialties related to their region. Aside from the well-known European schools, Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, which of course have their own foci, students in the Uagadou in Uganda focus on alchemy and astronomy as well as transfiguration, but a lot of their students go on to the Arabian Academy of Magics in the middle of the desert on the Peninsula and learn how to harness djinns and things (in fact the network of Institutes of Magical Learning on the African continent have a long history of harnessing truly fascinating magics regarding contacting ancestral spirits that frankly sounds fascinating to me…not even getting into the fact that they’re the best transfigurers and animagi in the world). I honestly can’t remember what the school in South America is called—Castle-something, I think—or the one in Japan, though I think they both do a lot of Herbology and Potions and things like that. And that one in the middle of Russia…

I can’t even _pronounce_ that one. 

Anyhow, after getting her marks for the Crushing Awful Tests (CATs), which are analogous to NEWTs and which are considered by the wizarding community over here in the UK to be not nearly as rigorous (though honestly I couldn’t imagine it being easier patiently learning the languages of and then talking to animals and plants and everything and encouraging them to do things for you instead of just waving a wand at them and getting them to do what you want), Mum had chucked over a chance to take a job at the Wizarding Senate of the American North, a prestigious body centred in Montreal that presides over all the magical world of Canada, the US, and Mexico, and instead gone to study abroad in the UK for a muggle degree in Celtic Civilisation at Edinburgh Uni, saying she’d always wanted to study in Scotland. Mad, eh?

But then, who am I to complain, when that’s where she’d met my father?

Armed with her skills, Mum had taken a break in March during the gap between winter and spring terms and decided to hike from Aberdeen to Inverness through the Grampians and along the Great Glen, like a mental case. As one might expect she’d been caught in a late and sudden blizzard, and been busy warming herself on rocks heated with an _incendio_ charm to keep her toes from falling off when a muggle lad who lived around Torry found her there making rocks glow and muttering conversations with the plants and rocks around, apologising for burning them. Instead of thinking her utterly mental and escorting her to the nearest loony bin, he’d given her his scarf and they’d gotten to talking, since for one thing he had badly wanted to know how on earth she’d made rocks glow without a fire. He’d been a physics student St. Andrews at the time, home for the term break, so of course he’d been interested in how she was breaking every natural law in order to keep warm.

This lad from Torry had become my father, eventually, and Mum had settled here with him rather than going back to the job waiting for her in Montreal that she hadn’t wanted anyway. They’d had six kids like randy fools, and of the lot, three of us have magic. I have a younger sib down in Hufflepuff where I probably should have gone, and one in Slytherin, the ambitious little git. The other three are off at school as well; the eldest is attending Brown University over in the US, the second eldest is studying some sort of engineering at Kelvin College in Glasgow, and the youngest is just beginning muggle secondary in Edinburgh, just down the way from where the family still lived off Dalkieth (which is incidentally just a street or so over from the Pollock residence halls Mum had stayed in while studying at the Uni, because she is sort of a creature of habit). 

Apparently, there had been a bloody great battle right here in the middle of Hogwarts forever ago, while all this was going on; the last one in the war with Voldemort actually. Mum had been finishing her programme of study for Celtic Civ at Edinburgh during the mess, having taken her degree right afterward, in June ’99, so luckily she wasn't anywhere near it. She and her muggle beau had married directly after, he having gotten his degree in the same week and gone straight on to grad school while Mum took work with the biggest broom-engineering company in the UK, based off the Royal Mile (WildWind Racers; we’d all gotten fancy brooms as a company perk one year, and mine is still competitive enough for races over the quidditch pitch on a good-weather day. I didn’t need it for more, since I would never be coordinated enough to play quidditch myself. I couldn’t even keep hold of the quaffle, and it has divots in it for your hand). 

Anyhow, Mum had gotten pregnant pretty much straight off like I hear loads of folks did right around then--something about celebrating after the end of a war or something--and then had the first three of us in quick succession before waiting a bit to jot off the last set. My Hufflepuff sib is in fifth year and is sweating through her OWLs as we speak; the younger one, in Slytherin, is plugging away with admirable spunk in third year and doing alright for a half-blood in that house (though, since the war, things have been quite a bit better down there; there are even a few muggle-borns in Slytherin anymore these days!). Doesn’t keep it quiet either, to his credit, or lie about it. He gets in a lot of fights, but with sibs in other houses, we back him well. But he’s gotten in with a neat crowd pretty much from the start; Albus Severus Potter and his boyfriend Scorpius Malfoy, who are a year ahead of him and a year behind our sister in Hufflepuff, are in his crowd. They’re, like, _famous_. Or at least their parents are.

Between the lot of them, I’m proud to say, they’re helping to fix up the reputations of those houses. Hufflepuff has a lot of good students at the mo’. Our sister’s tops in that house; she’s passed on some of Mum’s talking-to-the-plants magic from the American School (as folk call it here), and gotten really popular with Professor Longbottom. She’s also friends the Weasley kids (who are Potter’s cousins, by the way, and are also from families that were famous in the war. Actually, I think the Weasleys are friends of the Thomas-Finnegans, too. To hear the twins tell about it, they all have meals together every other Saturday). Meanwhile, the little bro’s part of a campaign started by Potter and Malfoy to bring about the revitalization of the Slytherin image. They’ve worked together with Potter’s aunt (Deputy Head Granger-Weasley of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, who had been a Gryffindor and who really, to read her additions to the texts we used of late, ought to have been in Ravenclaw) to publish a notice on the walls of all the school’s boards about an addition to all History of Magic textbooks, setting the historical record straight about the reason why Slytherin started out being all about purebloods in the first place. (I’m proud to say I helped proofread the notice, which they’d abridged from Granger-Weasley’s additional chapter). 

If you want to know the details, basically they started riffing off of a lecture Granger-Weasley had made here at Hogwarts back in, what was it? My second year? She does a lot of guest-lecturing about harmony between magical races, campaigning for better treatment of giants and elves and such…but sometimes she takes over for Binns for a day. Apparently she and some other graduates from Ravenclaw and Slytherin have gone to great lengths to work out the actual reasons why Slytherin had such a bad name for so long. (I bloody _love_ this sort of thing.)

You ready for it? 

Go back to the Middle Ages. Put yourself in the superstitious, ignorant peasant mind-set of the Dark Ages: the Inquisition. _Malleus Maleficarum_. Witch hunts and all that. See what I’m getting at? 

No? All right. 

In class in our first few years we all learn about witches and wizards who had such good protection against being burnt that they even fooled muggles into burning them more than once, for a laugh; but their kids didn’t have as much protection, being less proficient in magic yet. In the interest of keeping magic kids safe from persecution during all that madness, the four founders not only made Hogwarts unplottable and to look like an old ruin to the naked eye if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but they also pondered and wrangled on how to keep the students safe from marauding bands of murderous muggles with burning and hanging and pressing-to-death on the brain. Super unscientific and unimaginatively non-magic ways to kill people, but they hurt the same for pre-graduate witches and wizards as it did for defenceless muggles who didn’t have a magic bone in their bodies. 

So the four founders came back together with their ideas for keeping the kids safe. Helga Hufflepuff said, ‘Well, if we make friends with everyone and treat them all fairly, there shouldn’t be any need for bad feelings, and no one will betray the school to the muggles because the students would all be in it together’. And my dear Rowena Ravenclaw said that ‘Anyone who’s intelligent would see that it’s completely illogical to hurt magical people if you are one yourself, so if the school only took in intelligent people who were good at logic, there’d be no problem, obviously.’ (Makes total sense to me.) Only, Godric Gryffindor basically said that ‘If everyone we let in was to be brave and warrior-like, they could fight off anyone who was an enemy to magic folk, so why not take in just martial sorts willing to fight and defend the school?’ Which left poor, misunderstood Salazar Slytherin, who had maintained that ‘The only _truly_ safe way to be entirely sure that there would be no spies in such a school who could harm the magical community would be to only allow determined and resourceful, _current_ members of the magical community—i.e. purebloods—to be our students.’ (Of course, as Ravenclaw had pointed out, if the people coming in who were muggle-born could do magic, they were equally in danger from the mobs of frightened muggles, and were also automatically part of the magical community, and so Slytherin’s was a rather conservative idea…but then, I’m biased.)

The short of it was, Slytherin’s had been a totally understandable idea for his medieval time that had just gotten carried way out of context. I mean, it isn’t as if we’re currently living amidst an Inquisition or a witch-hunt anymore. Once out of context, that pureblood bit had been carried to a logical conclusion that went completely out of hand by the time Voldemort, aka Tom Marvolo Riddle, had gotten to the school. The mythology that had built up around the whole purebloods-only thing in the interim had played right into his hands, and he’d turned it into something it was never meant to be. Just as Grindlewald had before him, if you read your history books, and as it had for some over at Durmstrang. Unfortunately for the Slytherins, Voldemort’s spin on the rule had nearly destroyed the house of the man he had supposedly admired so, because the so-called “Dark Lord” had been completely incapable of recognizing that maybe Salazar Slytherin hadn’t shared his prejudices as motivation.

Which explained why so many Ravenclaws had remained friendly with the Slytherins during the war, or even avoided the fight altogether if given the chance. The former lot could understand the logic behind the original conception of Slytherin House, just as they could the reasoning behind the others…and the latter lot had likely figured, why gamble your life on a fight that, logically, you weren’t likely to be able to win with just a bunch of kids and teachers and animated statues? Logic isn’t cowardice; it's using your head instead of just rushing straight into battle. 

That’s why we have Gryffindors, eh? They don’t stop to ponder the logic of a fight; they just dive right in, like old Godric brought them up to do. Good thing for the rest of us, in the long run, of course, that they’re so impulsive…but if I’d been there, I couldn’t say for sure what I’d have done once I’d seen the size of the invading force. 

I’d have definitely weighed my options, though.  
***


	3. Chapter 3

Damn. Got off track. That happens, though, when discussing the ins and outs of a fascinating theoretical puzzle. 

Really, though Granger-Weasley had worked hard to get her theory added to the textbooks. She had finally won out in an ongoing effort to “end specious and dangerous infighting between Hogwarts houses which merely encourages divisions in the British magical community later on”. But really, there isn’t much way to know for sure what was really going through the minds of the people who founded the school. I mean, we know the broad outlines, but it isn’t like we have records of every one of their conversations and debates or anything. This is all theoretical, if based entirely on the few remaining records of conversations between the founders and on the temper of the times. But as an interpretation, it is eminently sensible, isn’t it? Otherwise, if Slytherin had really just meant to be divisive from the start, why would the other three have even allowed him to found a house in the school in the first place? They had to have seen some merit in his suggestions or they’d have chucked him out from the start, and Hogwarts would only have ever had three houses. I mean, it would’ve been three-to-one against, right? Logically speaking, of course.

Dad says that Ravenclaws are like Vulcans. I’ve seen “Star Trek” with him, and I’d have to say that he’s pretty close to correct. Except I have loads of emotions. 

Especially when there are riddles involved.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. First day. 

You all know how it goes; troop off the boats all chilled and soaked through, hang about shivering in the entryway for what seems like months in all that cold stone while everyone else who came in on carriages is sitting all snug and warm at their tables already, then kind of mutually slope into the great hall and sit under the Sorting Hat one by one, hoping like hell you don’t get put in a house you don’t want (in my case, Gryffindor, as you might have guessed. I’m about as athletic and brave as a mushroom; all I want to do is read and study and have people be nice to me. Plus, it sounds bloody loud). Finally, ages later they call your name; too soon if you’re early on in the alphabet, like me, or too late entirely if you’re further down. One way or another, everyone on earth seems to be staring at you like you’re an actual walking mushroom as you slouch up to the stool. You put on the hat, maybe try to hide in it while it mumbles and grunts at you, maybe teases you a bit…and then gives you what’s usually the right answer. Then you finally get to join your house table and get some food before you completely go to pieces from cold and nerves; even listen to a nice song from the Hat. 

McGonagall’s start-of-term speeches are usually short, and heavy on the “follow the rules, and no one will get hurt” part. The Gryffindors are lucky they got someone a bit more easy-going in Swifty, once she took up the office of head of house for them.

Could you imagine having McGonagall in charge of your house? Professor Flitwick is the easiest person in the world to talk to; even a tetchy little first year couldn’t be intimidated by him…but we all respect him enough not to get into trouble or tease him like the Slytherins sometimes do. He’s smart as a whip, the Charms master; you can’t put one over on him.

Well, so, I was sorted into Ravenclaw, just like I’d hoped and prayed, and passed the Gryffindors and Hufflepuffs to settle in with my blue-clad mates. The first night, we all got in the door on the power of the prefects’ answers to the riddles (they took it in shifts), which meant there was no one left out in the cold. After all, one riddle would do for about ten people. 

The nightmare began the next day, on the first day of actual term. 

I’d woken up to find that sometime in the night, unbeknownst to me (I sleep hard when exhausted, but then no one I talked to noticed either) someone or something had come in and given us all scarves, hats, and mittens in house colours, and also had somehow affixed the Ravenclaw House crest all over all our plain black cloaks and robes and other uniform things, so we had our badges set. 

Here’s another tangent. No one ever seems to question it, but I’ve always wondered about that, though I’d never gotten round to asking. I should bring it up with Flitwick before I leave for good; are the things magicked to just self-adhere without any direction while the first years sleep (and, I suppose, for anyone who’s outgrown or destroyed their robes and things since the previous year)? Or does the head of house sneak in and do all of them up? Seems unlikely that they would, given the amount of sleep I’d like to have before facing an unruly mob of uncertain kids for the first time, though it’s probably old hat to most of the masters by now. Or do the poor house elves sneak in and do them while the little blighters are having their first kip in their dormitories after a long and exciting day? 

The elves could do it, you know, with a flick of the finger, no wands needed (though all non-humans can carry wands now, since Minister Granger-Weasley wore everyone down. Can you imagine; it used to be illegal for elves and centaurs and the lot to have wands! Rubbish). Anyhow, that’s my favoured theory; the elves come in and pop all the badges and crests on, bobs-your-uncle, while they’re shooting laundering and drying spells about, tidy up the common rooms (once I found out they did all that every night I started picking up after myself more carefully. Can you imagine having that job? Not to mention spiffing up the lavatories, even if they do use magic!), and pop back down to hopefully have time for a kip before starting in on breakfast. Considering it’s an extra burden, if it is the elves, I just hope the poor buggers have enough of them to do it in shifts, or that they stock up on a lot of sleep before start of term.

Anyway, as you'd expect I woke up with everyone else, gaped at my decorated clothing, bumped around trying to figure out my schedule and where to go (honestly, it’s easier than it sounds; you just have to always remember east to west and north to south and use your own tower or basement as a reference. Why does everyone make it sound so complicated? So the staircases move; just count the patterns. Every fifth or sixth or second move is the same; there’s only so much variation in the spells. I mean, it’s not like they’re sentient or anything!). I bolted breakfast, my usual swatches of toast and tart and lovely bits of sausage, all slightly cold as I’d accidentally had a bit of a lie in (that’s most often how I have breakfast, since I’m usually up late studying, or hanging about outside the common room door), then dashed off to my first Charms class just in time. After that it was Potions with old Slughorn, who’s just the jolliest person on earth to use such a dismal classroom, then Transfiguration, then lunch. Then I’d dashed back up to the Ravenclaw tower to change out my books…only to be stymied by my utter and complete inability to get into my own common room.

To be fair, the knocker started out taking it easy on us first years. “Why is a raven like a writing desk? Seriously?” I’d demanded. “That’s an unanswerable riddle! No one knows the answer to that one!” But, incredulous that the door’s knocker would pick something based in muggle literature, I’d tried the standard answer anyway; “Poe wrote on both of them?” only to be asked—get this!—who was Poe!

Can you believe it? “I don’t know the magical answer to this question! Can’t you give me something else?” I’d asked, desperate, but the rotten door had stubbornly refused to budge…till a fifth year had come bustling by and took pity on me (“They both start out with ‘rrr’,” he’d said gently, patted me on the head, and nodded me politely through the now wide open door first. “Go on, then. I’m late for Divination with Firenze, and he doesn’t tolerate tardy students.”)

“They both start out with ‘rrr’?” I’d demanded of thin air, once inside (the fifth year had disappeared immediately up the stairs). I’d turned back to the eagle's head, incensed at the apparent unfairness of the trial. “What, like when the raven warms up to begin cawing? To clear its throat? And the desk begins with ‘rrr’ because of how it’s said?”

I still haven’t got the straight of that one. But you can understand, perhaps, why I’d taken from that experience that I should just be able to come up with whatever specious explanation I needed to in order to bargain my way through that damned door. 

Unfortunately, though, the door doesn’t see it that way.

And so it began; and so it went on…for. Seven. Dismal. Years. 

Not _once_ have I gotten a riddle right, gotten the door to open myself. Always someone else is going in or coming out while I sit and wait…and the riddles just keep getting harder. 

It really _had_ been taking it easy on me at the beginning, that silly old eagle. I’ve spent more time sitting and waiting for someone to open the stupid thing more than I’ve sat in class or inside the common room, I’d wager. 

Sometime halfway through first year I’d made friends with a Hufflepuff in my year, Gina Ogilvie-Muhmad on the strength that she’d had her own problems, with her family and with being at Hogwarts (in her case, because half her family, the muggle side, was also having cultural difficulty with accepting a witch in the family for religious as well as general muggle reasons). We’d gotten closer still sharing our woes, and once she’d heard my sorrowful tale she had told me how to get into her own common room and said that I was welcome to spend time there in lieu of my own should I need respite and a place to study. “I reckon no one will mind; we’ve Ravenclaws hanging about a lot. You’ll be welcomed.” (Which we found out later, incidentally, is technically sort of not something she should have done--inviting an out-of-house guest inside and giving them the code--since no one before me had apparently ever been inside the Hufflepuff common room without a direct escort, at least according to legend anyway. But they'd forgiven her in the end since she was a wet-behind-the-ears first year; what had she known back then? Anyway, after that her prefect had been all, ‘Well, what’s done is done, and this one seems more than half Hufflepuff anyway’ to which I’d had to admit the Hat had very nearly put me there). 

I _had_ been welcomed, _and_ made comfortable—though they had changed the combination they tapped on the barrel to get in, to my embarrassment—so much so that more than once I’d forgotten to watch the clock. Round about the third time when I’d ended up stuck in their common room for the night because it was too late to be out wandering the halls, the Hufflepuffs had come to see me as sort of an extension of the furniture. After the fifth or so afternoon and night I’d spent curled up on one of their insanely comfortable sofas, dreading the lonely journey back up to the empty tower hallway (bad enough without the regular fear of being caught out and costing Ravenclaw more points than I already had), the kindly Hufflepuffs had more or less adopted me as a sort of bumbling, sweet-natured, misplaced Ravenclaw cousin. I helped them with my best subjects, if little else; in turn they helped me with theirs, and gave me a sanctuary in the lower parts of the castle.

They all say I have the heart of a Hufflepuff, and they can’t see why I hadn’t been sorted with them all along since my regular presence is clearly a sign I was meant to wear a badger rather than a eagle. 

I’ve had bouts of believing them. 

Anyway, I don’t mind being an honourary Hufflepuff, since I’ve likely spent more time in their lovely, warm common room than in the airy one I call home. I do miss mine while I’m gone, though. For one thing, I love blue. I adore it, point of fact. It’s the best colour there is, in my humble opinion. 

Who decided that riddles were the best idea for an entry test, anyhow? Rowena Ravenclaw herself? Well, if so, she was a wonderful, amazing brain of a lady, but she was a bit discriminatory, eh? 

Well, it’s 2025, Rowena, and I’ve got news for you; if I could just find a loophole in the magics that routinely short-circuit smartphones and things at Hogwarts, I could rig up an electronic or magical lock for the Ravenclaw door that’d run off of our fingerprints or something, and save me all this misery. I could likely get my cousin, the one who’s brilliant at electronics, to figure it out for me—it’s likely some kind of dampening field cast by the magical aura of the school that interferes with the wireless signal or something. Then I could get in any time I wanted.

I know, I’m whinging, but bloody hell. _Seven. Years._  
***


	4. Chapter 4

I finished the Transfiguration NEWT well enough, I think, last-minute studying or no. That had been an exam to remember. I think I’ve passed at least. It remains to be seen if it’s well or badly as it’s not my best subject. (History of Magic is, incidentally. I’m not even remotely concerned about how I did on that NEWT.) My other best subjects include Astronomy, which is still to come, and also Charms, and Ancient Runes (both of which I’ve already done and the latter of which I expect to pass rather well…but I’m pretty sure I muffed a few of the spells in the Charms practical. I’d gotten a bit flustered. But I’d had reason; the examiner was really shirty with me. Wish I knew what I’d done to offend her. 

Anyhow, after days of not sleeping and a hundred anxious hours of poring over my pile of books in the hall outside Ravenclaw tower, I’ve got my Herbology NEWT next, then Astronomy last of all, and I’ll be done. Kind of bittersweet, actually. Potions, which is possibly my worst subject when it comes to practical application, was blessedly gotten out of the way first. I’m not even sure why I continued with Slughorn after OWLs. I’m alright when it comes to the theory of it all, but when it comes time to put it into practice I somehow always manage to make things go _poof_ , or burn a hole in someone’s cauldron like a first year who can’t read well. Which is really irritating considering I might really need some proficiency in potions for my independent study project ongoing. 

Well, at least I likely won’t need the practical part of the subject for my projected career, any road. Independent studies aside, no doubt I’ll end up working some boring research job where theory will do nicely. Which is just fine for me. Leave the proving things to adventurous sorts. Like, you know, Slytherins and Gryffindors. 

I choked down some sort of supper with exceptional speed, studying star charts as I did, having passed Herbology well enough I suppose, thanks in equal parts to “Powerful Plants, Wizarding Weeds” and Billy Bollinger. Shortly after that I found myself up on the Astronomy tower with the other star-buffs, staring up into the darkness and charting everything in sight. By the time the examiner told us to leave off, I was certain I’d probably “aced” that one, as Mum would say.

Exhausted, I trudged back down from one tower to turn round and head to the next. Gina walked at my side of course, grumping about having missed too many answers in both the Herbology NEWT and this one. I commiserated, though no doubt she’d beaten me in at least three NEWTs. She was easily the best of the two of us at Potions—maybe at Transfiguration as well, and let’s face it, if I'm ever to get anywhere with my independent project, I’d better keep her at my side, right?—and odds-on she’ll beat me at Herbology, if only due to the proximity all Hufflepuffs tend to have to plants just...everywhere. 

“Can I kip with you?” she asked abruptly, rather than turning off to head down to the basement. I stopped, startled, and stared at her. “They’ll be loud down there,” she whinged lightly, “nearly as loud as Gryffindor after quidditch, and I’ve a headache. Ravenclaw’s always quieter than other houses.”

“Do you need to go to hospital?” I asked anxiously. “They say if you stare at Mars too long, you can go blind…”

“I don’t need to go to Pomfrey,” she told me patiently. “Don’t fuss.” And she gave me her best winsome blink, an expression she knew left me utterly defenceless.

“Well,” I hesitated, aware of an odd burning sensation in my chest that said I was about to face another, entirely unexpected, NEWT. “If you’re sure, of course you can kip with me.” I bumped her shoulder teasingly, speaking as lightly as I could. “I won’t take advantage of you, if your head’s hurting you,” I added then with a waggle of my brows. I rather hoped I sounded suave—or at least cute—rather than clumsy. Lines like that always sound better when you read them. 

Gina laid her head on my shoulder (I had always hated how tall and gangly I was, had always felt awkward…till Gina, who seems to like laying her head on my shoulder. She has a way of making people who are taller than the norm feel like it’s a good thing) and rubbed her temple on the point of my acromion. “I’d say go ahead anyway, if I weren’t exhausted,” she told me, and groaned as her head found a particularly sore spot with my collarbone’s end. “I’m so glad that’s all over; it’s been _such_ a long year.”

It wasn’t just my reservations over tussling with that damned door with an audience that gave me pause. It was really hitting me how much I was dreading the end of term; how I was finding more and more that I honestly didn’t want seventh year to end.

It hadn’t been only because NEWTs had been nothing to look forward to. 

Gina is hoping to get a job with the floo network after school; she’s been looking forward to helping redesign the network to accommodate greater traffic. There are loads more witches and wizards now that the last of the wholly pureblood families, the Malfoys, had unbent a bit about the whole marrying half-bloods thing (Scorpius’ mother was apparently a pureblood on the face of it, but to hear him tell it, there was some question as to whether there was actually a half-blood or two in Astoria Greengrass’ family, their being continental and having nothing bad whatsoever to say against even muggleborns. Which meant that supposedly, per my time with the Slytherin set, nothing bad was to be said about them in his home anymore. His mother had supposedly even spoken with disapproval about the rhetoric that had led to the last disastrous wizarding war, to his dad’s parents’ dismay). Anyhow, the old network just couldn’t handle the strain anymore, and lately it had been dropping off people in Tunbridge who’d meant to go to Cornwall and things like that; it was a disaster, and getting worse. 

Gina, who honestly has the heart of an engineer, is raring to go and straighten it all out, apply a bunch of new ideas. She’ll be working out of London mostly, though obviously she could go anywhere to live, I suppose. Or I could. It isn’t as if we couldn’t both apparate (though she’s loads better at it than I am), and even after seven years sometimes it was hard to stop thinking like someone who’d grown up with a foot and a half firmly planted in the physics of the muggle world.

Meanwhile, I’m meant to go off and work at Hester’s Histories in Birmingham. And while I’m thoroughly excited at the prospect of searching for lost magical lore in a bunch of old monks’ texts they’d just dug up from a lost monastery at Skye a year or so ago—we could completely revolutionize the textbooks used at this school and others!—it’s going to be truly absorbing work, as is Gina’s prospective job. What if…

“We won’t change anything, you know,” she reminded me for easily the tenth time this week. 

So she’s a _legilimens_ now, apparently. 

Not that it’s a big stretch, since I’ve been agonizing about us losing our way with each other more and more often as NEWTs approached. “I’ll come where you are, or you’ll come where I am, every night,” she went on. “We’ve lived apart, officially, the entire time we’ve been here, and that hasn’t stopped us yet.”

A good point, except… “Yeah,” I snorted, “if you don’t count me practically living in Hufflepuff all through second, third, and fourth years…”

She nudged me cheekily with her elbow, catching me just beneath my ribs. “You spent more time down there during OWLs year, I think. Made your little sister into quite the talker…”

I grunted and rubbed my side where she’d poked me. My little sister has a big mouth. Mum and Dad had gotten quite the earful during fifth year’s holidays, about Gina and I and how I’d stopped kipping on the Hufflepuff sofas along about then…and yet had been seen leaving the girls’ dormitory in the cellar in the mornings anyway. 

The poor child hadn’t quite realized what it all meant, I don’t think. 

Didn’t matter, of course, since once they’d met Gina my parents had thought the world of her (not that I blamed them for taking to her, since she’s clearly wonderful). They’re so enthusiastic about her now that sometimes I think they like her more than they like me; but then, I think since they’ve always wanted me to be the boy they’d expected, they might believe that my being with Gina indicates I’m falling in line or something. Doubtful, but I suppose I can’t blame them for trying. Gina always said she was grateful that my parents like her, since so much of her own family thinks she’s mildly terrifying, at best. “She of course, didn’t know that you just had a good place for me to keep my books so I could get them again in time for classes,” I teased.

“Oi! That all?” She sounded amused.

“Well…and your bed’s softer than anything,” I told her in my loftiest tone.

Gina raised one dark brow expectantly. “Just my bed, eh?”

I made a sour face, rapidly losing my sense of humour in favour of becoming preoccupied with the coming, embarrassing trial. “Yeah, and I can get in and out without needing a prybar and a stick of dynamite…” This would be another standard, humiliating night, I’d realized too late. It was currently after midnight; only people who’d been up for the Astronomy exam would be out and about, and most of the rest of them had gone while I’d lingered in the corridors with Gina waffling about going up or down. Now no doubt I’ll just embarrass myself trying to get us into Ravenclaw, and we’ll have wasted a trip. “We’ll end up in Hufflepuff anyway, in the end,” I pointed out with a sigh, and nodded at the downward stair. “Why don’t we turn around now and save ourselves the climb?”

Gina poked me again. “I have faith in you.”

I warded her off and caught the offending digit before I could be the object of a third assault. “Seriously…it’s not that far if we turn around now.” I couldn’t face that; not in front of her. I do have some pride left, after all. Precious little, but it’s _all_ I have…and it would dribble away quick as anything if I had to face that blasted door again on the last night here; especially with the one person I want most in the world to impress and measure up to standing there watching me fail.

Gina stopped to eye me in the dim torchlight of the hall. “I love you to pieces, but you’re going to have to beat this thing sometime.” She had on that immovable look that said I wasn’t getting out of this. “For one thing, I’m not going to leave Hogwarts having never spent a single night with you in your dormitory.” 

And that was that. Whenever Gina spoke that firmly, there wasn’t much room to argue. 

Besides, she's right. We’d spent every night we’d had together in her bed since the first time she’d shyly asked me why didn’t I come with her rather than spend another foreshortened evening on one of the Hufflepuff sofas. I’m not too proud to admit that I had since been too embarrassed to ask for help from a passer-by to get into Ravenclaw whilst carrying my girlfriend in tow; not when it meant that everyone knew for a fact that I wasn’t bringing her up there to study. 

Not that my fellow Ravenclaws cared, per se, any more than I reckoned the Hufflepuffs did. It wasn’t as if they didn’t already know, and all…but it was humiliating to need help to get the door open to get your date upstairs, innit?

We stumped our way up to the highest tower in the place, aside from astronomy, and I was wishing the whole time that I’d had the presence of mind to have just _accio’d_ our brooms over and taken a flight from one turret to the next. Surely there’d be a way in to the top floor of the dormitory from outside; some version of _alohomora_ one could use on bricks (they’d done it in Diagon Alley, after all, to get in there from the Leaky Cauldron), and then we could’ve circumvented the door entirely and have already been toasty warm in my four-poster, me rubbing the ache away from Gina’s temples. But no…I hadn’t thought of that, and there’s no actual way in from up there anyway—a window, maybe?

Never had the trudge up to the highest level of the castle taken so little time. All too soon we were before my nemesis; that dreaded, heavy damned riddle-bound door with its mocking, sightless bronze eagle’s head looking at me with that gimlet glare.

Now or never. Moment of truth. 

I don’t mind saying that it had never filled me with greater dread. 

“Oi!” I called in a show of bravado as we stalked up to the thing. I was feeling belligerent. “I’m going to get in you this time, you hear me? I’m not going to take no for an answer. Give me the riddle.” It was all bluster…but if confidence was like smiles…maybe I could even convince myself. 

I’m glad to say that the door didn’t comment on my show of false assurance, didn’t do anything cruel to burst the façade, like ask if I’d somehow gotten pissed on Guinness in a pub and then come back for a go at the aperture late at night. I probably might die if the thing decided to take a turn for the sassy and ask me if I needed it to call me a cab or something. 

“Very well,” it said instead, unruffled as ever, and at once launched in with, “I am the beginning of every end, the end of every place; I am the beginning of eternity, the end of time and space.”

Oh, hell…these ones always get me off on the wrong track. Right away I’m thinking cosmic forces, wild natural phenomena, physics, nebulae… Gina’s standing there watching me with those patient, dark eyes, willing me to get it, probably already guessing it herself but leaving it to me as if she’s going to teach me to have faith in myself by letting me sit here all night wrestling with something so simple that I’ll feel the biggest dullard on earth once I hear the answer tomorrow morning… 

She’ll probably break up with me.

I’m panicking, already giving up, and she’s just watching me, full of unutterable faith, and it’s more than I can bear. I start to tell her, “Let’s just go, okay?”...but somehow, the words won’t come out. 

I can’t do it, can’t let her down…even though eventually, I know I will. 

I close my eyes, try to get a grip on myself. This is like slaying a dragon with a toothpick, but… /I _have_ to give it one last try. For her, for myself. I have to _beat_ this!/

“I am the beginning of every end,” I repeated slowly, “the end of every place; I am the beginning of eternity, the end of time and space…” /There’s always a trick, remember it’s a trick, people actually think these things are _fun_ … What’s at the beginning of every end? If it were literal, it would be a bomb or Armageddon or something… No, that doesn’t make sense…/ My mind whirled, began to reel into that old, familiar feeling of helplessness. /Maybe it does; supposedly the Big Bang is at the beginning of eternity, but not at the end of time and space, unless it ends in another explosion…/

/Wait. Explosion has an E to start…and the beginning of every END…the word ‘end’…the beginning is E…/ I dashed through the rest in my mind, praying I had it right, feeling a growing conviction that I had something. By the end of my rehearsal, I’d never felt more confident. There was an ‘e’ at the end of ‘place’ and at the beginning of ‘eternity’…end of ‘time’, end of ‘space’… “I’ve GOT it!” I nearly shouted. “The letter ‘e’!!! Which is also the first letter of the word ‘explosion’, which I almost said,” I blathered, sweating… 

There was a dreadful pause… My heart sank like a stone. I couldn’t look at Gina, I was going to sink into the floor with shame. /I’d _actually_ thought I’d _had_ it, what an idiot, that can’t be right, it’s too simple…/

“Well reasoned!” the eagle warbled unexpectedly…and started to open. I swear it sounded relieved.

I gaped at it. 

Obviously it was a mirage. 

I simply couldn’t believe it. 

I stood rooted to the spot for a moment, stunned, unable to comprehend…and finally tore my gaze away, once the door was nearly all the way open, to stare at Gina, who had lifted her head to beam at me proudly. “See,” she said, and stood up on her toes, despite her aching head, to kiss my cheek in congratulation. “I knew you could do it, before the end.”

/‘Before the end, E. At the end of Before, E,’/ my heart sang inanely. Gina was looking at me like I’d just run a marathon and won a quidditch match at the end of it. She gave me a little push through the doorway before the thing closed again. I stumbled in automatically, and she followed. Because I was busy trying to help her through the last bit where there was that hundreds-of-years-old rough spot in the lip of the entrance, I didn’t see that there were nearly twenty Ravenclaws still awake in the common room, celebrating having finished their OWLs and NEWTs, till I was nearly knocked off my feet by a roar of approval from my normally library-quiet housemates. 

“You did it, Kaide!” Someone shouted, and the crowd roared again. I stared, arms still outstretched to help Gina, as the crowd surged toward me. “You got one!” shrieked Evelyn Porter, and gave me a big wringing hug and a glancing kiss on the cheek. “Good on ya, mate!” Noel Goldstein told me with stubborn heartiness, and lifted a mug of butterbeer in a genial toast...and I right now I barely even noticed a word and usage that would have probably made me cringe any other time, I was so overwhelmed. And distracted, since a fifth-year I don’t know all that well shoved a mug of same into my hand right then, while Joel Thomas-Finnegan handed another to Gina; I was being buffeted on the back by my entire year and not a few of the fifth years while Josh Thomas-Finnegan and Erica Thomas-Finnegan both wrung my hands enthusiastically, and I was sure I was going to cry if I stayed down here too much longer. The white and blue room was starting to blur with bronze stripes, and I was squeezing my eyes shut repeatedly to hold back the tide. 

I slugged down my butterbeer quickly, feeling queer inside, like someone had just lifted out my belly and left behind something made of soft, warm, molten gold, and I realized belatedly that this was probably my proudest moment since I'd received my first Hogwarts letter addressed to "Kaide" rather than "Kaiden". It was a minute before I felt Gina tugging at my hands, as the rest of our mates finally subsided to return to their ongoing end of term celebration. “C’mon,” she told me with a faint grin; and she was so beautiful, smiling at me despite the crease on her brow from the headache. “I think it’s about time you showed me your dorm room, eh?”

“Isn’t it great, though?” I asked, waving my empty mug around the common room that finally, for the first time, actually felt like mine. On my last night, of all things. 

I was feeling decidedly misty. 

“It’s lovely, Kaide,” she agreed, and waggled a brow at me. “But I’ve seen it before. Only I haven’t been upstairs yet,” she told me pointedly. 

I laughed and tugged her toward the stately statue that guarded the stairway to the dormitories.

FIN


End file.
